Catalogue entry

Pencil, each 15 7/8 × 10 7/8 (40.4 × 27.6) with the exception of T03044 which is 10 7/8 × 15 7/8 (27.6 × 40.4). All are inscribed on the verso with densely packed writing in Spencer's hand
Purchased from Mrs J.M. Fothergill-Smith (Grant-in-Aid) 1979
Prov: Purchased by Mrs Fothergill-Smith at various times between 1955 and 1959 from the artist through Messrs Tooth with the exception of T03043 and T03048 which were purchased directly from the artist in 1955
Lit: R.H. Wilenski, Stanley Spencer Resurrection Pictures (1945–1950) with notes by the artist, 1951; Keith Bell in catalogue of exhibition Stanley Spencer RA, RA, 1980, pp.196–208

Between 1940 and 1946 Stanley Spencer painted a series of pictures on the theme of shipbuilding on the Clyde for the War Artists Advisory Committee and which is now in the Imperial War Museum. In May 1940 Spencer visited Lithgow's shipyards at Port Glasgow where he made drawings on which the first of the shipbuilding series was based. He made other visits to Port Glasgow between 1940 and 1945. Later Spencer wrote in one of his notebooks: ‘One evening in Port Glasgow when unable to sleep due to a jazz band playing in the drawing-room just below me, I walked up along the road past the gasworks to where I saw a cemetery on a gently rising slope...I seemed then to see that all in the plain were resurrecting and moving towards it... I knew then that the resurrection would be directed from this hill’ (quoted by Wilenski, Stanley Spencer: Resurrection Pictures 1945–50, 1951). A painting by Spencer of the Port Glasgow Cemetery executed in 1946 belongs to the British Council.

Spencer planned a large stepped canvas fifty feet across with Christ in Judgement as figures rise from their graves. As this was impractical he painted a series of smaller, independent pictures. Three derived from the original idea: ‘The Resurrection, Port Glasgow’ 1947–50 (Coll. Tate Gallery), ‘The Hill of Zion’, 1946 (Coll. Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston) and ‘The Angels of the Apocalypse’ 1949, (Coll. Dr. the Hon. C. H. T. Chubb). Paintings in the series, relating to the Resurrection and based on the Port Glasgow Cemetery were:

A further painting ‘The Resurrection with the Raising of Jairus's Daughter’, 1947, was conceived originally in 1939 while Spencer was staying at Leonard Stanley in Gloucestershire and was not based on the Port Glasgow Cemetery.

Spencer made drawings for the Port Glasgow Resurrection series in one or more ‘Derwent’ scrapbooks bought from the stationer in Leonard Stanley in 1939. Nos. T03036-T03050 and T03061 all relate to paintings in the Port Glasgow Resurrection series; no painting is known which relates to T03062.

T03042 DRAWING FOR RIGHT-HAND SECTION OF ‘RESURRECTION: PORT GLASGOW’

Inscribed t.r. ‘45’ and ‘4(?)3’ in pencil and ‘89’ in red crayon; b.l. of centre ‘5ft’ and ‘4ft’ in pencil

This squared-up drawing is close in composition to the painting in which the figure on the right has his foot on a spade, unlike in the drawing.